Cold November
by JennieMac
Summary: Father Adler receives three very strange visitors one night in November 1997.


Three of these characters are not mine, but J.K. Rowling's. Can you guess which ones? No copyright infringement is intended.

………………………………………………………..

**COLD NOVEMBER**

This was November, and Old Father Adler was tired.

That was an understatement. If the truth were to be told (_And above all things_, as Old Frau Adler used to say when he was a child, shaking her finger and threatening him with a willow switch, _let us have truth_), Old Father Adler was exhausted, bone-weary, done in. Old Frau Adler, his grandmother, had been merely sixty when he had thought of her as "Old" Frau Adler. Seventy years later, this was, and Old Father Adler had reached the once-unthinkable age of seventy-seven years, an age his grandmother had never seen, nor his father, nor his mother. Nor had many people he had once known.

The rain had ended hours ago, long enough ago that the fallen brown leaves lining the street were dry and crackly again, but the cold mist—the one which always seemed to spring up around twilight-time, lately--was keeping the pavement slick. It made him shiver, just to look out into that mist tonight. _There was something about November,_ he thought. Something about the leaves going dry and brown and falling to the ground and crackling when you walked on them, like the dried bones of the very old, which had always made him slower and more tired. November took the life out of him, and on this night he felt decidedly old.

_November,_ he thought with a weary, silent sigh. The month to which he least looked forward, and he always told himself it was because of the harsh, windy weather and the dried leaves and the slate-gray sky. He always told himself he was putting off dealing with personal and congregational problems and not thinking enough about spiritual duties because of the approaching holiday season and all his practical duties at his church. But the truth (_Let us have truth_) was that the chill somberness of cold, windy, wet November, gray November, had always made him less able to deal with things.

So he did not think of his congregation or his spiritual duties tonight: tonight, he thought of Berlin, and of his mother, without really meaning to, as he gazed out the window at the misty, leaf-strewn road in Surrey. He thought of growing up in Berlin in the calm between the two wars, of the ice cream and the May-pole dances, of the uniforms and the camaraderie, and what fun it had been for the children, really, when you didn't consider the ugliness that came after. Berlin, on a rainy night, when the pavement seemed to shine and the streetlamps glowed softly into their second-floor apartment: he and his mother, together, listening to the church bells toll the hour. It had grown later and later.

The moon was out tonight in Surrey, and cast its misty glow down on the bare tree limbs and the occasional car, driving too fast, much too fast for this narrow, foggy, rain-slicked road, but they all drove too fast, nowadays. Somewhere close by, one of the cars backfired with a series of three sharp pops, like bottle rockets or gunfire. Father Adler started halfway out of his easy chair, a gasp caught in his throat, and froze for a few moments before shivering and settling back.

He sat in his front room with his back to the fireplace, facing the large picture window with a clear view of the darkened, fog-muted street. As he was steadily gazing out the window and across the front lawn, looking for the backfiring car, he should have been able to see anyone walking up the path toward his front door. It was with the greatest surprise, then, that the old priest was shaken from thoughts of his youth in Berlin some five minutes later by a rapid—some would say, frantic—knocking at his door.

Adler was shaken, and he stumbled to his feet, glancing all around like a scared rabbit, expecting to see he knew not what. A glance at the clock on the mantel showed 11:45 in the P.M., just about the time he would usually be dropping off to sleep. He re-buttoned his trousers and pulled his old, threadbare housecoat back on with a small sigh as he limped toward the door. He reached for the knob just as there came another hurried burst of knocking from the outside. This time, he heard muffled voices behind the door as well: a young woman, and a boy or man, speaking to each other in a clipped, strained fashion. He frowned. He'd not seen anyone approaching his door, which meant they'd approached by stealth, which meant he probably didn't know them.

Or, it meant he had not really been paying attention, which was entirely possible.

He sighed again, and told himself to get on with it. Someone needed him.

He opened the door on the foggy, cold night, and he regarded the three figures he saw there with quiet resignation. There was a girl, about seventeen or so, with a long, delicate-boned face, wide brown eyes and masses of curly hair wilting around her shoulders. As the door opened, she was saying in a soft, low, but decidedly bossy voice, "We have to, there's nowhere else. We have to get him inside somewhere…" She trailed off when she saw Father Adler.

She had been addressing a tall boy of about the same age, with shocking red hair in need of a trim and the weedy look of a person who has grown about a foot taller since his last birthday. They were both gasping and panting as though they'd run for miles (though Father Adler could have sworn they had popped onto his porch out of thin air), looking rather ragged around the edges with frayed cuffs and dirty sneakers, as if they had not slept in a decent bed for weeks. Months, even. But it was not the boy or the girl or their ragged condition that worried Father Adler at the moment. It was the third figure, the one that the boy and the girl were supporting between them.

He was the same physical age as the other two, but it took only a glimpse in his eyes—bright, startling green—to see that he'd experienced much in his short life. Adler was reminded of the survivors he'd met from POW camps in Germany and Poland, or those who'd experienced some great disaster—an airplane crash, an earthquake, the Allies bombing Dresden—and carried the story around for the rest of their lives, written on their faces. This other boy was thin and weedy, too, shorter than the other one but taller than the girl; she was struggling to keep him up on her side. He leaned almost all his weight on his two friends, his shaggy black hair falling into his face. Unlike the other two, who were breathing as though they'd just been chased five miles by hungry wolves, this boy was silently weary, almost languid: Adler got the feeling he was just barely conscious. The girl's knuckles were white where they grasped his hand.

There was a beat of silence as they all sized each other up. Then, the girl spoke again. "Please, sir…" Her voice trailed off again as she spied his collar; her eyes did that familiar flick downward and then back to his face, the one he'd been encountering most of his adult life. "Father…" she continued, her voice small and uncertain. The red-haired boy frowned across at her, and she shot him a glance before plowing onward. "We really need to get our friend inside somewhere. May we come in, please?" She said it all in a rush, her eyes locked with his.

"What?" It was all he could say. Most people weren't this direct, when seeking shelter, especially when he'd never laid eyes on them before. "Who are you?"

The girl let out a small sigh and glanced over her shoulder as the red-haired boy grunted and hitched his friend's arm more securely around his neck, stooping over in what was clearly a very uncomfortable position. Adler frowned and followed the girl's gaze back into the yard. There was a slight breeze blowing the dead leaves over the pavement with a weary kind of scratching noise, and the fog seemed to have grown thicker, blotting out the houses on the other side of the street and encasing them in a damp chill. As the girl turned back to him, he heard a twig cracking somewhere in his yard behind the children, somewhere out in the cold fog, and he gripped the doorframe more firmly.

"Please," the girl said again, more softly, and he looked back at her. She was gazing steadily into his eyes, her mouth slightly open and her nostrils flaring with each breath; her expression was one of fierce intelligence and unblinking honesty and, above all, awful desperation. He'd seen the same look on many young faces, and he recognized it at once: these kids were in bad trouble.

Her voice was low and steady, though, as she said, "We don't mean you any harm, Father, and we won't intrude long. We'll be gone by morning, you have my word."

Another twig cracked behind them, and the dry leaves rasped over the pavement as another cold little breeze came up, stirring the bare tree branches. Tearing his eyes away from the girl's with some difficulty (they were familiar eyes), Adler looked out into the fog. Clearly, he couldn't leave the three of them outside all night. And if they meant to rob him, well, they'd be disappointed by the slim pickings inside. Besides, the black-haired boy looked in rough shape, and no matter how he'd gotten that way, Father Adler thought it would be right to help him. "Yes, yes," he said, a bit more gruffly than he'd meant to, his accent coming out. He stepped back from the door. "Come in."

They did not wait for a second invitation. With a final glance back into the bone-chilling fog, Red helped his friend stumble through the doorway and into Father Adler's sitting room. The girl glanced back toward the street again, as well, as she moved in behind them. The look in her eyes was one of mingled relief and hollow fatigue of the _my-God-I-can't-take-much-more_ variety, and it was also too familiar to Father Adler, and it gave him chills as he stood aside for her.

As soon as they were all inside, the girl whirled back toward the closing door, pulling a ruler-length strip of wood out of some inner pocket of her cloak and pointing it first at the door, then at each of the windows in turn. After making sure his friend was comfortable on the sofa, Red joined her in this strange behavior with a stick of his own, muttering under his breath as he waved it at each of the windows and even at the crack beneath the door.

Adler could only stand back and gaze at the two of them, mouth open. Finally he came to himself enough to clear his throat, but the children took no notice, continuing to wave their sticks around the room. He tried again, a bit louder, and this time the girl glanced at him for an instant, as if flicking a fly off her shoulder, before resuming her muttering and stick waving.

"Did they-" Red asked.

"I don't think so," she answered.

Adler had had enough. "Excuse me," he half-yelled from where he had remained standing beside the closed front door, "Just what do you think you are doing to my windows with those sticks?"

The boy and girl looked around at him, eyebrows raised. They were grouped around a window on the far side of the room, one which faced the side yard with its willow tree and hedge; they edged a bit closer together as the girl stuttered, "We, ah…"

The boy interrupted her. He'd been squinting at Father Adler, or more particularly, at Father Adler's collar, his red head cocked to one side, as though trying to work something out. "So you're a priest?" he asked, stepping forward, a small frown creasing his freckled brow.

Father Adler nodded at him, smiling a little.

"I've heard that…" the boy began, but the girl appeared to hurry up behind and kick him, and he went silent, giving her a rather dirty look.

"What have you heard?" asked Father Adler, a small smile now curling the corners of his mouth up into his moustache. It tickled his lips, but he didn't like to trim it.

"Nothing." Red glanced shiftily at the girl, whose eyes were still shooting him _shut-up_ warnings as she crossed the room to where their sick friend lay.

Father Adler studied him for a moment, still smiling. "You're Church of England, am I right?"

"Er…" Red (Adler's imagination insisted on referring to him as _Der rote Junge,_ The Red Boy in German, and Adler could only call him Red, now) looked over toward the girl again, but she had turned away and was fussing silently over the sick one. Red stuffed his hands into his pockets and stared at the floor as he answered, "Yeah. Church of England. That's it."

"Hmph." Father Adler's smile widened and he moved forward to clap the lad on the shoulder. "Well, let me answer a few of those questions for you. No, we're not allowed to marry, and no, that doesn't mean we're all poufs."

The kid looked up, his eyes wide. "I didn't…"

"It's all right," Father Adler said, chuckling and holding his hands up in front of him. He knew he had shocked the boy, but occasionally a good shock was needed in a tense situation. "If you have any more questions, out with them. I don't embarrass easily. All right?"

The boy nodded, frowning again but looking slightly more relaxed. Adler patted him on the shoulder again, a bit more gently this time, and strode over to where the girl was tending to the sick boy. She had him laid out on the sofa, his feet propped with throw pillows. One of her hands held his head steady while she tipped a thermos up to his lips. The boy coughed and moaned while drinking (water? Adler wondered. Or something else?), and his eyelids fluttered, but he did not wake. The kid was not looking good, Adler thought: his skin was pale and slick with cold sweat, faint shadows stood out beneath his eyes and cheekbones, and every few moments his entire body would tremble as though receiving an electric shock.

Red frowned down at his unconscious friend, and said to the girl in a half-whisper, "He needs-"

"I know," she answered, not looking away from the sick one. She capped the thermos and stowed it beside the sofa.

"Child…" Adler began, reaching out to the girl, then thought better of it when he saw the protective way Red was hovering over her. He stood back instead and asked, "What is your name, child?"

She looked up, her deep brown eyes (so familiar…why?) appraising him. Finally she made some kind of internal decision and arranged her face into a carefully guarded smile. "Hermione," she said.

Adler felt his eyebrows shoot up, and he could not help clapping his hands in delighted surprise. Hearing a truly unusual name was always a treat. "There's one I've not heard in some time," he said, noticing the uncomfortable glance young Hermione shot Red, and the frown he sent back to her. "Greek, isn't it?" he continued.

She nodded and turned away, frowning, her eyes roving over the sick boy's face. She had taken his wrist and seemed to be counting his pulse.

"Do you know the language yourself?" Adler asked. He kept his voice quiet and calm, not wanting to draw attention to his questions but wanting to keep her talking. He had to get as much information out of these kids as he could, before they inevitably clammed up on him.

"Very little," she said. She was biting her lip and frowning down at her watch, still holding the boy's wrist.

"I, myself, had to study it at great length…" He trailed off as Red knelt down beside Hermione and placed a long-fingered hand on her shoulder. She looked quickly around at the familiar touch. He raised his ginger brows at her and she shrugged her shoulders once, sighing. They shared the silent communication, Adler realized, of those who have spent a great deal of time alone together.

Adler cleared his throat and the two children frowned up at him. He started again, just for a moment, as the two pairs of eyes bored into his. He was reminded, for a brief instant, of a film he'd seen in his later youth, after he'd come to England, called _Village of the Damned_. It had been based on a novel by John Wyndham called _The Midwitch Cukoos_, and by far the most disturbing image it contained was that of the children, the blonde alien children with the glowing eyes, the children who had invaded the little village and taken it over. He still saw those eyes, sometimes, in half-remembered nightmares. When the children in the movie stared at you, and their eyes glowed like cat's eyes in the dark, and the air was filled with that piercing, wavering highest-note-on-the-violin sound, they had control of your mind and they could make you do anything.

_The Midwitch Cukoos_, he thought, as this boy and girl stared up at him. He could almost hear that wailing violin note, that ringing in the ears, could almost see the glowing eyes. He had a sudden, eerie feeling that they were powerful and dangerous, these two, and could cause him great harm in some way he didn't fully understand, if they so chose. They way they had looked at him, he had seen that if they suddenly lost control of themselves, he would be in trouble. Bad trouble.

Then the eerie feeling was gone, and he shook his head to be rid of the last of it. _Get a grip, Adler._ He leaned forward, glancing sidelong at the sick boy, who was now twitching in his stupor. The kids were just scared kids again as they watched him, and he made his voice low and pleasant, conversational, as he said, "I've seen this before, you know."

The sick boy moaned again and shifted on the sofa, and Hermione studied his face so intently she appeared to be memorizing his features. "You've seen what?" she asked, her voice hollow and distant, and it took Adler a moment to realize she was still addressing him.

Adler gripped his creaky knees and settled back in his chair with a slight huff, fitting his lower back into the lumbar-support cushion and swiveling the chair around to face the three visitors, before answering. "It's withdrawal, yes?"

Hermione's head shot up; a few of her long curls sprung from behind her ear and fell across her face as she raised an eyebrow at him. "What?"

Adler nodded. "As I said, I've seen it before. Is it heroine?"

Now, incredibly, one corner of the girl's mouth was tugging upward, as though she actually wanted to smile. Really, Adler thought, this was no laughing matter. He turned to the ginger-haired boy, who had fallen to his knees to rummage through his rucksack and was depositing random items all over the floor in the process. Red stole looks at Hermione and Adler in turn, his mouth open, but when he caught Adler's eye, he went straight back to searching his bag. At least he wasn't about to laugh.

Red and the girl didn't look at all well, either, now that Adler studied them more closely. It was no wonder Hermione was on the verge of hysterical laughter. These two were not sweating and shivering like the boy on the couch, but they were still very pale and they both appeared exhausted. Adler watched as Hermione smoothed a clump of damp black hair from her friend's forehead, exposing a ragged scar above one of his eyebrows. The girl's elbows jutted sharply on thin arms, and how small around and bony her wrists were! Did he, he wondered, have a trio of young addicts on his hands, and if so, what would he…

"Got it," Red said. He had pulled a small, silver foil-wrapped package from the bottom of his rucksack and handed it to the girl, grinning. She took it from him with a grateful smile and softened eyes, which confirmed Adler's earlier theory that these two had spent quite a lot of time together.

Adler leaned forward again and laid a gentle but firm hand on the girl's shoulder. "I'm afraid I can't allow you to do that," he said, maintaining his quiet and conversational tone. "Not in my house."

Hermione's smile fell. Red made a move as if he wanted to stand up and argue, but she laid a hand on his knee and shook her head, and he fell back at once. When Hermione turned back to Adler, the corner of her mouth was tugging upward again.

"It isn't anything illegal, Father," she said in a slow, patient voice one might use to explain simple addition to a four-year-old. She tore open the brown paper and held up its contents. "It's only chocolate."

He had just enough time to make out the word _Hershey_ on each little square division of the chocolate bar before Hermione had turned away again. She began breaking off pieces of the candy and feeding them to the sick boy, who accepted them reluctantly and barely seemed able to chew and swallow.

Adler sat back in his chair, feeling immensely stupid. Chocolate, of all things.

When the sick boy had finished the entire chocolate bar, Hermione turned to Adler again. "Do you have any more chocolate, Father?" she asked, her voice much softer now and no hint of a smile on her face.

Adler sighed, peering down into her tired face and that of the sick boy. "I could make some cocoa, but really, I don't see what good it will do. He needs a hospital…"

"It will do good," she interrupted in the same quiet voice. "And a hospital won't help."

Adler gripped his knees and propelled himself to standing with much popping of the joints, causing Red to look askance at him. "All right. I'll go and set the water to boil, but when I return," and he pointed a gnarled finger at her, "You and your friend…" A glance at Red, who had returned to scooping his belongings back into his bag, "Are going to tell me what's going on here." His accent, always thicker when he was nervous, rendered his words nearly incomprehensible, but the two of them had clearly understood.

He fully expected to have been robbed by the time he came back out of the kitchen.

The pot still stood on one of the side burners from Adler's earlier tea. He filled it again and set it to boil, then paused a moment and gazed out the window into the mist. Was it his imagination, or had the fog lifted a bit since the kids had come into his house? It had, he decided: he could nearly make out the closest wall of his little church through the trees in his back garden. So strange…he rubbed his chin, his fingers bristling across the shaggy stubble of three days' neglected shaving. Shaving tended to slip his mind, in November.

After a moment he realized he was no longer gazing out at the dissipating fog, but at this own reflection in the window. He raised his palm from his chin and stroked his thick, coarse hair. Unlike his father, he had kept all his hair into old age, and before it had become gray sometime in his mid-fifties and seemingly overnight (he remembered getting his first gray hairs around his temples, and the feeling of impending doom which accompanied them, with a small chuckle), it had been a handsome red-brown, a shade somewhere between the brown of young Hermione's hair and the red of her friend.

The boy, Red, reminded Adler so much of himself at the same age. Stumbling, unsure, through life and love and getting into more trouble than was his due: he looked the type. Breaking his share of hearts, no doubt; he though of the smiles and silent communication he'd seen between Hermione and Red. Adler remembered giving and receiving such smiles at that age. What would they be, seventeen? Eighteen? About that. For Adler, seventeen meant Berlin, in the summer of 1937. Before the war. Before any thought of entering the priesthood had entered his addled brain. Before a lot of things.

And all of a sudden, Adler realized why the girl's eyes were so familiar. They were the same shade of brown Dinah's eyes had been, at the same age, in the summer of 1937.

He turned from the window to find the kettle already boiling. How long had he been standing there? The kids would have robbed him blind by now; they were welcome to whatever they could find. God knew it wasn't much. He turned the burner off and hastily assembled a tea tray for the guests he now knew to be gone, substituting cocoa for tea, as it seemed so important to the girl. How kind and earnest she had seemed. How like his mother. How like Dinah.

He fully expected Hermione and her friends to be gone when he brought them the cocoa, but he was wrong again. They had not even tried to rob him, and they were still there.

Adler reached the living room doorway and paused. _Der rote Junge_ (why would his mind insist on the German now?) was standing at the large front window, gazing out at the night and at his own reflection as Adler had been, moments before. Adler watched as Hermione left her sick friend (now resting more quietly, though Adler refused to believe the chocolate had anything to do with this) and approached Red. She reached out tentatively, when she was close enough, and touched him on the arm; it was no more than a feather-touch, but still the boy had been so deep within his own thoughts that he jumped as Adler had jumped at the backfiring car.

"Sorry," she whispered.

Red turned at once and reassured her with a crooked grin.

"Just wanted to say…" she stumbled over her words, tried to cover it up by reaching up to smooth her hair (curlier and darker than Dinah's had been, but the eyes were the same), and continued, "You were really…brilliant, earlier." She paused to stare at her feet. "If it hadn't been for you, we wouldn't have made it."

Red was already shaking his head. "No way. That was all you. I didn't even see them coming, that's how thick I was."

"But," she protested, moving closer to him and touching his arm again, "That means you reacted more quickly than either of us. And that was the first time you've ever conjured a Patronus, wasn't it? A proper one, I mean."

Red's face had been growing, well, redder by the moment. Now, it blossomed into another wry, lopsided grin. "A proper one, yeah, you could say that." He nudged her on the arm in what could have been a friendly gesture. "Never could do one in class. It's like with the troll, isn't it? _Wingardium leviosa_."

Hermione nodded, staring down at her feet again. "I remember."

"I can only do it when I really need to," Red said.

"Yeah."

They were silent again for several moments, biting their lips and staring at each other. They had obviously been speaking in some private code, as he hadn't understood half of what had just been said, and Adler felt this would be an opportune, if awkward, moment to remind them that they were not, in fact, alone in the house. He backed up into the kitchen a few steps and rather noisily bustled up to the doorway again, announcing, "Cocoa's ready."

The two teenagers didn't spring apart upon his entrance as Adler had thought they would, but they did look back at him rather guiltily as he set the tea tray down on the coffee table beside the sick boy and settled back into his chair.

They spent the rest of the evening in conversation. Hermione did most of the talking on behalf of the three young people while she tipped hot cocoa into her sick friend's mouth. Adler didn't believe a word of her cover story (the three of them had been set upon and robbed while camping nearby, and were fleeing their attackers when they happened upon Father Adler's house). He let it pass, however, in light of the fact that the three teens had not, as he had expected, tried to rob him. In fact, Red was soon asleep where he sat, leaning against an arm of the couch, his head sharing the pillow with his friend's feet. Said friend, the one with the jagged scar on his forehead, was awake a short time later, and able to sip some cocoa on his own, gripping the cup and saucer with trembling fingers. Red woke up when his friend did and greeted him with a relieved smile. The black-haired one with the scar was introduced as Harry, and Adler decided to leave it at that.

Adler talked as well, telling them stories from his youth, stories of the war and of his group of friends in seminary, stories of his parish and the children he taught. He managed to make himself jolly and unconcerned, and to put them at ease. Adler managed to get more information from them than they knew they were giving: they'd all been at school together, they'd not had contact with their families in some time, and they did not wish to draw attention to themselves (they turned down Adler's offer to phone the police about their supposed robbery, saying they preferred to just forget it).

He listened to Hermione's voice, and tried not to think of Dinah, and tried not to tell the one story that had been in his mind ever since he'd remembered whom it was Hermione reminded him of.

…………………………………………..

The summer he was seventeen, Alfred Adler had been preparing to go off to University, and he'd been in love with Dinah.

It was clumsy, mind-addling love, as all love at seventeen is. She was a girl from the same neighborhood on the outskirts of Berlin where he had grown up, with hair the color of honey and ivory skin and a short, dainty pair of legs that had driven young Adler quite mad just thinking of them. They had very few chances to be alone, that summer before Adler went away, but they stole every one they could find.

Dinah had a slow, warm kiss. Her hands were light and soft. Her lips tasted of honey and cinnamon, and her brown eyes were so earnest as she said his name in the dark. "Alfred," she'd said, as they kissed for hours in corners and alcoves and down alleys at sunset. Just, "Alfred." God, how he'd loved her.

And still, he'd gone away to University in September. It had been what was expected of him. And when he returned for his first visit home in the cold, gray November, she'd had another fellow, because he hadn't written to her as he'd promised, with one thing and another. And he felt a twinge of regret when he saw Dinah at the movies with someone else, when she'd catch sight of him and give him a long, questioning look with her earnest brown eyes. Still, he'd let her go without a fight.

And then it was 1939, and the war had begun, and Adler's mother was pushing him to declare for religious studies, the precursor to entering Catholic seminary. Boys who were studying for the priesthood were being given passes from military service, she said. And he'd followed her advice to make her happy. And he did think of Dinah then, briefly. But only briefly, because although there had been girls after her, she was the only one who'd ever made him feel anything. And she was gone.

In 1941, when they were both older and Adler was preparing for seminary and his mother had died happy in the TB ward of a state-run hospital, knowing that her son was safe, Dinah and her family disappeared off the face of the earth.

This was not unusual in and of itself. In those years, whole families disappeared in the night, and you pretended you didn't notice if you knew what was good for you. Adler did not even learn that Dinah was gone until he was home during the seminary's winter break, which began in late November that year. He happened to walk past Dinah's house—or maybe it wasn't such an accident--on a cold November day in 1941 when the leaves were dragging along the sidewalk, leaving sad, rasping trails behind, and he saw that her house was dark and still and cold inside, and suddenly he was dark and cold inside. He saw that the windows of Dinah's house were broken, and he became broken too. He saw, above all, that the house was empty, and had been for some time.

Even then, when they had only been gone a few months, he could, somehow, have found her. He could have saved her. He knew it then and he knew it later. It was this thought that would haunt him when he was an old man of seventy-seven, and the war was long over. That, and the cold, empty, broken feeling of his soul as he walked away from Dinah's house on that gray day, never quite whole again.

The truth was, he'd been thinking of her as "gone" for so long, he didn't know what to do, now that she really was gone.

So he did nothing.

………………………………………………..

Hermione was sitting outside on the front steps in the cold light of dawn, and the black-haired boy was showering in the bathroom, and Adler and Red were alone. And somehow, after a long, long silence, Adler was talking about Dinah. Red was listening, silent, staring into the guttering fire and letting Adler talk, because Adler needed to.

"The greatest regret of my life," Old Father Adler told young Red as they sat together in the firelit living room, watching the shadows dance before the sun came up, "Is that I did nothing to find her, while there was still hope." He paused and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his aching knees. "Years later, when we were losing the war, when I had had to put a uniform on after all, when it was obvious to me that she and all her family must be dead…only then, did I have any conscious regret." Adler looked up to find the boy staring directly at him, and expression of mingled recognition and grief in his eyes. "War does something to you," Adler said, while the boy nodded slowly. "It deadens you. You go into survival mode, thinking only of yourself." He hung his head. "It makes you weak." He could feel the boy still looking at him, but could not bring himself to look back. Instead he stared at his gnarled hands, twisting useless in his lap, the joints swollen.

"Thank you!" Hermione's voice rang out as she pushed the front door open, followed by a muffled beep as she hung up a mobile phone. Adler caught Red looking up toward the doorway, toward the sound of her voice, toward her warm brown eyes. She was so much like Dinah had been. Red's eyes were shadowed and it was impossible to read his expression, but Adler could have sworn he was frowning.

Hermione stuffed the mobile phone into her hip pocket and leaned against the open doorway with eyes only for young Red. Her body sagged against the doorjamb and her mouth cracked into a warm, sweet smile of relief. "We're all set," she breathed. "Headquarters."

Red smiled back at her. "Tonks?" he asked. (They were obviously speaking in code again).

Hermione nodded. "She has a mobile phone now. She gave me the number last time we were there."

Adler raised his eyebrows at the cryptic conversation as the dark-haired boy strode back into the room, looking very much the better for his cleaning up. His hair was smoothed down over the scar on his forehead again and his face was tinged with pink now, rather than the deathly white it had been the night before. "Did somebody say headquarters?" he asked, bending to gather his rucksack from beside the sofa.

"Yup." Red nodded.

"Excellent." He moved toward the door as the other two began gathering their own belongings.

"Listen, do you kids have some place to stay? I could recommend a few good places…" Adler began, but quieted abruptly when he realized the three of them were all packed up in the space of a few seconds, ready to go and standing by the door. Goodness, but they were quick. "I'll take that as a 'No, thanks,'" he finished.

Hermione smiled at Father Adler. "You've been wonderful, Father, thank you so much for letting us stay." They might as well have been old friends bidding goodbye after staying the night during a long journey…which, he supposed, they were, if you left out the 'old friends' part. "You don't know how much you've…" She broke off, frowning at Adler with what he was startled to find was a look of pity, and glanced at her two friends. "Do we have to, this time? I don't know if I can…"

"I'll do it," said Red, gripping her shoulder and squeezing in what, again, could have been a friendly way. "I'm better at memory charms, anyway."

She grinned at him and turned away. "Goodbye, Father," she called over her shoulder, waving as Father Adler scratched his head, trying once again to decipher their coded conversation.

"Bye, Father, thanks," said the dark-haired one, following Hermione out the door and onto the front walk.

Adler turned to young Red, who was reaching into his pocket with a rather resigned expression. Adler felt the first twinge of alarm he'd suffered for their entire visit, but relaxed again when he saw the boy pull only the wooden stick out of his pocket. "Not ones for long goodbyes, are they, your friends?"

"Listen," Red said. "I wasn't going to ask…before…if you were a pouf."

Adler stared at him for a moment, and then burst into hearty laughter. "My dear boy, forgive me. I jumped the gun on that one."

Red shrugged. "I was just going to say…I mean, I've heard my dad say, about priests, well…" He grew shy all of a sudden, and shuffled his feet. "He said they're honorable men."

"Ah," said Adler. He didn't know quite what else to say. After regaling the boy with the story of how he'd abandoned Dinah, he expected Red had quite a different opinion now.

"And I just wanted to say…" Red cleared his throat. "That from what I've seen, he was right."

Adler was rendered speechless for a second time in as many minutes.

"So listen," said Red, taking a few steps closer to Adler and finally looking him in the eye. "I've got a question."

"Yes, my boy?"

"If you could forget her, would you want to?"

Adler gaped. "What?"

"If it were possible," said Red, keeping his voice low, "For you to forget Dinah, forget that you ever knew her, never have to think of her again…would you want to?"

"Would I want to forget Dinah," Adler repeated. He blinked and stared into the serious blue eyes of the boy before him. He thought again of the _Midwitch Cukoos_, and of his hunch that a great and terrible power lay behind those eyes, and he wondered, crazily, whether the boy had meant it as a rhetorical question. "Would I want to forget I ever knew her."

Red nodded.

"My boy…" He placed his hands on the boy's shoulders and grinned. "Not in a million years."

Red grinned back. "Didn't think so." He stepped back out of Adler's reach, and raised the wooden stick so that the end of it was pointing directly at Adler. "But I had to ask. Because, you know." He inclined his head toward the wooden stick.

Adler stared at him, at the tip of the wooden stick, back at the boy. "What are you…"

Red frowned. "I guess you don't know. Just as well."

"May I ask-"

That was as far as Adler got. He heard the boy say "Obliviate," quite clearly, and he saw a flash of light, but he would not remember either.

………………………………………………..

Old Father Adler woke up to the sunlight streaming in the picture window. "Damn fool, I've fallen asleep in the chair again," he muttered. "What next?" All traces of last night's fog and damp were gone, and the sun was actually warm on his face for the first time in weeks. It was going to be a beautiful Saturday, even in cold November.

He'd been dreaming of Dinah, and in the dream, she'd been young, as he'd known her, and her warm brown eyes had glowed with the heat of summer.

FIN


End file.
